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Bibles. In the present edition the two stand side by side.

The marginal notes appended to the Apocrypha, which have next to be examined, differ not inconsiderably in tone and character from those annexed to the text of the Canonical Scriptures. They are much more concerned with various readings, as was indeed inevitable by reason of the corrupt state of the Greek text of these books, which still await and sadly need a thorough critical revision, by the aid of materials that have recently come to light. Authorities also are sometimes cited by name in the margin, a practice not adopted in the Old Testament1. Such are Athanasius, 1 Esdr. iv. 36: Herodotus, Judith ii. 7: Pliny’s History, Benedicite or the Song, ver. 23: Josephus, 1 Esdr. iv. 29. Esther xiii. 1; xvi. 1. 1 Macc. v. 54; vi. 49; vii. 1; ix. 4, 35, 49, 50; x. 1, 81; xi. 34; xii. 7, 8, 19, 28, 31. 2 Macc. vi. 2: in the Maccabees after the example of Coverdale. Even Junius, the Latin translator, is appealed to eight times by name: 2 Esdr. xiii. 2, 13. Tobit vii. 8; ix. 6; xi. 18; xiv. 10. Judith iii. 9; vii. 3.

The texts from which the Apocryphal books were translated can be determined with more precision than in the case of the Old Testament, and were not the same for them all. The second book of Esdras, though the style is redolent of a Hebrew or Aramaic origin, exists only in the common Latin version and Junius’ paraphrase, which is cited for the reading in ch. xiii. 2, 13. In this book some excellent Latin manuscripts to which they had access (ch. iv. 51 marg.), as also the Bishops’ Bible, must have had great weight with its revisers. The Prayer of Manasses had to be drawn from the same source, for the Greek was first published in Walton’s Polyglott (1657), as it appears in the Codex Alexandrinus, the earliest that contains it, which did not reach England before 1628. The first book of Esdras (Ὁ ἱερεὺς as the Greeks call it) is not in the Complutensian Polyglott (1517), so that Aldus’s Greek Bible (1518) was primarily resorted to, as is evident from the margin of ch. ii. 12, the typographical error there described being that of Aldus (παρεδόθησαν ἀβασσάρω for παρεδόθη Σαναβασσάρῳ), which had misled the Bishops’ Bible. Besides this edition, our Translators had before them the Roman Septuagint of 15862, to which they refer, without yet naming it, in ch. v. 25; viii. 2. For the remainder of the Apocrypha they had access also to the Complutensian, which in the books of Tobit, Judith, Wisdom and Ecclesiasticus seems a close copy of Cod. Vatican. 346 (Cod. 248 of Parsons)3, to the Aldine, and Roman editions4; the latter “copy” they cite by name Tobit xiv. 5, 10; 1 Macc. ix. 9; xii. 37, as they also do “the Latin interpreters” in 2 Macc. vi. 1. By means of these Greek authorities they were enabled to clear the text of Tobit of the accretions brought into the Old Latin version, which had been over-hastily revised by Jerome. As a small instalment of what remains to be done for the criticism of that noble work, two passages in Ecclesiasticus (i. 7; xvii. 5) are inclosed within brackets in the books of 1611. The former is found in no Greek Text our Translators knew of, but only in the Latin and Bishops’ Bible: the latter occurs complete only in some late manuscripts, though the Complutensian and Cod. 248